Abstract
This essay examines Bodie, a California ghost town, as a “modern ruin.” Working from a hauntological framework, I first investigate how Bodie enacts a rhetoric of authenticity by inviting personal encounters with the mortality of the town’s missing inhabitants. I then complicate Bodie’s brand of authenticity by identifying how efforts to rouse the ghosts of the past destabilize the ontological security of its present viewers. I ultimately argue that tourists transform the town’s ontological instability into a performance of recursive gaze whose pleasures enable a perceptual management of overlapping temporalities, particularly as visitors imagine themselves among the ghosts of Bodie.
Acknowledgement
The author expresses gratitude to Nicolette Amstutz, Dustin LeBrun, Joan Faber McAlister, and Jenny Wood. Additional appreciation is extended to the Friends of Bodie Facebook group and to students in Professor Wood’s 2018 and 2019 Ruins: Rhetoric and Performance graduate seminars for their contributions to the development of this essay. Finally, the author offers heartfelt thanks to Robert C. Rowland, Jacob Justice, and the anonymous reviewers for their diligent refinement and affirming advice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Newspapers of the era recall many spellings and variants of Bodey’s name (Piatt, Citation2003, p. 22). DeLyser (Citation1998), for example, notes three options for his first name: William, Wakeman, and Waterman.
2. While Kuftinec’s (Citation1998) Derridean reading of Mostar offers some inspiration for this essay, my focus on touristic practice diverges from that scholar’s laudable work.
4. See also Bergman (Citation2003, p. 430), Bowman (Citation2010, pp. 194, 212), Conley and Mullen (Citation2008, pp. 181–182), Dickinson (Citation1997, pp. 8, p. 12), Dickinson et al. (Citation2005, pp. 89–90, 101), and Zagacki and Gallagher (Citation2009, p. 186).
5. I am hardly the first person to use the phrase “recursive gaze.” For another application, see Clark (Citation1995, p. 115). I also acknowledge my debt to similar frameworks such as “double articulation” (Dickinson et al., Citation2006, p, p. 28), “reflexive double meaning” (Strazdes, Citation2013, p. 239), and “reflexive layering” (Schmitt, Citation2015). See also Dickinson’s (Citation1997) notion of “pedestrian gaze” (p. 12).
6. Nora’s work has generated “varying attitudes of approbation and opprobrium” (Blair, Dickinson, & Ott, Citation2010, p. 8), earning critique for a tendency toward “magical enclaves” (Katriel, Citation1994, p. 17), dichotomization (Murphy, Citation2005, p. 74), nostalgia (Sturken, Citation1997, p. 5), myopia (Zelizer, Citation1999, p. 204), and neoliberalism (Henning, Citation2006, p. 138).
Piatt, M. H. (2003). Bodie: “The mines are looking well … ”. El Sobrante, CA: North Bay Books. DeLyser, D. (1998). Good, by God, we’re going to Bodie! Landscape and social memory in a California ghost town. ( Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. Kuftinec, S. (1998). [Walking through a] ghost town: Cultural hauntologie in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina or Mostar: A performance review. Text and Performance Quarterly, 18(2), 81–95. doi:10.1080/10462939809366214 DeSilvey, C., & Edensor, T. (2013). Reckoning with ruins. Progress in Human Geography, 37(4), 465–485. doi:10.1177/0309132512462271 Edensor, T. (2005). Industrial ruins: Space, aesthetics and materiality. Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers. Foote, K. E. (2003). Shadowed ground: America’s landscapes of violence and tragedy [revised]. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hell, J., & Schönle, A. (2010). Ruins of modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pezzullo, P. C. (2007). Toxic tourism: Rhetorics of pollution, travel, and environmental justice. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Sturken, M. (2007). Tourists of history: Memory, kitsch, and consumerism from Oklahoma City to ground zero. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trigg, D. (2006). The aesthetics of decay: Nothingness, nostalgia, and the absence of reason. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Bergman, T. (2003). A critical analysis of the California State Railroad Museum’s orientation films. Western Journal of Communication, 67(4), 427–448. doi:10.1080/10570310309374782 Bowman, M. S. (2010). Tracing Mary Queen of Scots. In G. Dickinson, C. Blair, & B. L. Ott (Eds.), Places of public memory: The rhetoric of museums and memorials (pp. 191–215). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Conley, D. S., & Mullen, L. J. (2008). Righting the commons in Red Rock Canyon. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 5(2), 180–199. doi:10.1080/14791420801989694 Dickinson, G. (1997). Memories for sale: Nostalgia and the construction of identity in Old Pasadena. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 83(1), 1–27. doi:10.1080/00335639709384169 Dickinson, G., Ott, B. L., & Aoki, E. (2005). Memory and myth at the Buffalo Bill museum. Western Journal of Communication, 69(2), 85–108. doi:10.1080/10570310500076684 Zagacki, K. S., & Gallagher, V. J. (2009). Rhetoric and materiality in the museum park at the North Carolina museum of art. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 95(2), 171–191. doi:10.1080/00335630902842087 Clark, N. (1995). Rear-view mirrorshades: The recursive generation of the cyberbody. Body & Society, 1(3–4), 113–133. doi:10.1177/1357034X95001003007 Dickinson, G., Ott, B. L., & Aoki, E. (2006). Spaces of remembering and forgetting: The reverent eye/I at the plains Indian museum. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 3(1), 27–47. doi:10.1080/14791420500505619 Strazdes, D. (2013). The display of ruins: Lessons from the ghost town of Bodie. Change Over Time, 3(2), 222–243. doi:10.1353/cot.2013.0011 Schmitt, C. R. (2015). Contours of the land: Place-as-rhetoric and native American effigy mounds. Western Journal of Communication, 79(3), 307–326. doi:10.1080/10570314.2015.1041651 Dickinson, G. (1997). Memories for sale: Nostalgia and the construction of identity in Old Pasadena. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 83(1), 1–27. doi:10.1080/00335639709384169 Blair, C., Dickinson, G., & Ott, B. L. (2010). Introduction: Rhetoric/memory/place. In G. Dickinson, C. Blair, & B. L. Ott (Eds.), Places of public memory: The rhetoric of museums and memorials (pp. 1–54). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Katriel, T. (1994). Sites of memory: Discourses of the past in Israeli pioneering settlement museums. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 80(1), 1–20. doi:10.1080/00335639409384052 Murphy, B. (2005). Memory, history and museums. Museum International, 57(3), 70–78. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0033.2005.00531.x Sturken, M. (1997). Tangled memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic, and the politics of remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zelizer, B. (1999). Exploring sites of memory. Journal of Communication, 49(4), 201–205. Henning, M. (2006). Museums, media and cultural theory. Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK: Open University Press.